After watching a DVD in a friend’s house the other night we flicked around the television for a few minutes. I’ve only got terrestrial television at home (a rabbit ears) which means I have four channels. Watching cable television in other peoples’ places usually makes me more than grateful for this.
Eventually something called [adult swim] came on. I watched for about four minutes before realising that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. And not in any rewarding kind of way. The Web exposes me to plenty of beyond-weird content that still manages to entertain on some level. This was just nothing. Someone else’s trip.
I got a cold, panicky view of what it must be like to be an old man, trying to fathom youth culture. Every time you turn on the TV it is loud and nonsensical and nothing is linear anymore. On the radio music doesn’t sound like music. It is loud and pornographic and entirely foreign. The news is full or horror and posturing and absolutes are a thing of the past. The faces of people on the street are closed and vacant.
While much of popular culture is pointless and unrewarding to me, it’s still somewhere I feel comfortable enough to criticise as a participant. It’s another thing entirely to be totally alienated from the times in which you live. What will it be like for us at seventy, or eighty, or one hundred and ten? What if every time I turn on the television [adult swim] is on, and people laugh when I point out how shit it is? I suppose we can always surround ourselves with the material of older times. Shore up the walls of our houses with twentieth century music and literature and live an a bubble of esteemed quality. Come to think of it, that’s really what most of us are doing right now.
In related news, Sparklehorse were completely fucking fantastic last night, so, for the moment, pop culture is still delivering.
— Jg Oct 16, 10:52 PM #
— Pierce Oct 16, 10:55 PM #
Actually the answer to your inquiry on what to do in age when the culture surrounding us no longer speaks to us is fairly simple to my mind:
Create culture. Create it rather than simply consume it. Plug away at it and create things for ourselves and others of like mind (and like age).
This touches upon something which I’ve noticed and been alarmed about for a few years now– there is no room, it seems, in music for adults. Music is as polarized as politics; on the one side is the “hip” youth market filled with watered-down 16 year old punk-wannabees, soulless latter-day hip hop, and faux-angst of every stripe. On the other is the easy-listening old fogey-market, consisting largely of washed-up old rockers and crappy comeback bands.
There was a time when the music on the radio was often created by adults and listened to by adults as well. Can you imaging a Steely Dan on the radio today for instance? A “let’s dance” era Bowie? A Sade? A Barry White? A Van Morrison? A Simon & Garfunkle? An Otis Redding? A Stevie Wonder?
Perhaps not The best examples, I don’t know, but it seems “adult music” meaning music for people above the age of 18 does not seem to be represented much. Accept as mentioned before as “nostalgia” bands.
Don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.
— Jaime Morrison Oct 17, 06:35 PM #
Secundus: C’mon, Jaime, there’s plenty of good stuff to go around, it just isn’t very popular.
The problem, so far as I can tell, is that the entire entertainment-industrial complex has accepted the demographic truth that we early-thirties types are mostly too busy making babies and growing fat bellies in the suburbs to pay attention to the artistic part of culture, save the tele, of course, where they toss what I’m to understand are a few bones (my friends tell me HBO’s original stuff is good; haven’t the box, can’t say).
— Jack Rusher Oct 18, 01:10 AM #
I understand what you’re saying with the whole “create culture” thing Jaime, but there needs to be a wider base. I mean, I can’t make music and there’s only so many times I can read my own stories and still find them as wonderfully whimsical and entertaining as they are.
If you look at different genres, there is a better age representation. All the big names in Folk, Country, Jazz, Classical are older. Circles within circles. As Jack says, it’s just not popular.
I’m not sure how Pop came to be owned by teens. I mean, they have no money. I suppose a lot of people do give up music as a serious interest when they hit adulthood. But Pop isn’t music as a serious interest anyway.
HBO’s stuff is way, way above the usual level of television. What parts I’ve seen, anyway. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras (BBC/HBO), Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Carnivàle. It’s just lovely to watch something not dumbed down.
— Pierce Oct 18, 01:29 PM #